When Every Surface is a Solar Cell

Every surface is a potential solar cell

Every Surface is a Solar Cell.

Some times, dreams do come true. What is we could make common house paint produce solar electricity just by adding a little something to it before it is applied and you can apply it just about anywhere. To good right?

SolarLayer is the new additive for paints, coatings and flooring that transforms any surface into a solar energy receptor. Through its application, any roof, wall, street or path becomes a photovoltaic generator, that works as a replacement or supplement to the traditional power grid. This technology is designed to work in 3 / 12V and is expected to lasts for more than 20 years.

SolarLayer is a registered and patented product, created by a group of scientists composed of Argentine, British and Swiss, who believe that it will revolutionise everything known in photovoltaics. The product has already been tested and implemented in different parts of the world where durability and performance was evaluated. In order to bring SolarLayer from the lab to the market, the group of scientists are now in a second stage of research and development, for which are calling interested people to finance the project through www.indiegogo.com

This will finally allow the consumer market to use solar energy energy, without changing the existing aesthetics of homes and roads. Among its main applications, we can name, street lighting, electrification of SOS posts, parking lighting, public offices and homes. The system can be used as a replacement or support to the electric grid. It can also be of major help for refugee camps, where tents can be sprayed with SolarLayer paint to generate electricity.

Consumer use of this technology should dramatically increase the use of renewable energies, reducing fossil energy requirements, fixed government costs and can even mean a tax reduction. The founders aspire that in the next 5 years every paint in the world will be mixed with SolarLayer. They estimate that using this technology everywhere, in the next 25 years the world would generate enough solar electricity to eliminate the use of non-renewable sources.

How does it work

Although the nano-molecular scientific paper will be published later this year, we do know that the SolarLayer is a system composed of three basic elements: a fibre conductor, photovoltaic cells and a voltage stabiliser.

The conductor is a super thin 2µm (microns) copper-based alloy fibre that acts as the basic conducting surface. This fibre can be fabricated as a cloth or as a powder.

The photovoltaic cells are the most innovative and revolutionary of the three components. They have the capacity to transform light sources to electricity, to work as an intelligent conductor and to sense the magnetic North. Cells surfaces have a series of conducting and non-conducting areas. Through a special process, each photovoltaic cell is able to use this areas to intelligently allow and stop energy flow from and to the fibre conductor avoiding a shortcut chaos. Most importantly, each cell will re-route energy coming from the fibre to the magnetic north. This is the way by which instead of thousands of possible destinations, the flow of energy always finds its way to the magnetic North where the conductor will end and the electric current will be trapped by a special copper wire.

The third component is the tension stabiliser that receives electric current from different parts of the conductor fibre by the copper wire and it stabilises it before generating a useful current output.

Once the electrical output is obtained, this system is connected to the house grid.